Ubiquitous computing or pervasive computing is a technology vision where computing and communication capabilities and information technology (IT) services are expected to be available wherever consumers are and whenever they need the service. Currently, there are 3.3 billion active mobile devices in the world, equal to half the entire world population. With increasing adoption of technologies like radio-frequency identification (RFID), wireless sensors, and wearable computing, the number of such smart devices is expected to reach one trillion by the year 2012.
This growth of mobile devices is leading to significant changes in the way consumers use technology. Consumers will soon get used to and will be expecting more intelligent products and services like intelligent buildings that save energy, intelligent home appliances that can alert and make decisions, intelligent transportation systems that can make decisions based on real-time traffic information, smart-grids etc. A whole new set of innovative industry specific business cloud products and services based on such pervasive computing will be created over the next generation. In this context enabling automated discovery of intelligent devices and communication between such devices is an important problem to be solved.
In a ubiquitous computing environment where there are several such smart devices, the devices that are used to perform a task will keep changing continuously as the user keeps moving around the environment. Also users will be using and releasing the devices based on their capabilities and availability and depending on the context in which they are performing a task. Also the devices may be powered on and off dynamically and their connectivity may also be on or off depending on several factors like the network availability, device interferences, etc. Enabling automated discovery of the devices by each other as well as collaboration between the devices needs to operate automation under such dynamic conditions and adapt to rapid changes in the environment. The potential number of devices in the environment can also be huge in certain contexts such as those involving RFID, so scalability is also a concern.
Therefore, there exists ample opportunity for improvement in technologies related to device discovery and communication.